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Why is employee satisfaction important?

Customers and employees are the most important human pillars of an organization. While most organisations concentrate on understanding customer satisfaction, few have invested sufficiently in their employees’ satisfaction. However, organizations are judged by their performance, which is a direct outcome of their work culture and environment.

Organizations today invest a lot in training their employees, but if they don’t pay heed to signs of disengagement, they may end up losing a chunk of that investment to attrition. This is not merely a financial loss but also disrupts the long term planning of the organization as it fights to maintain some measure of continuity in its endeavours.

While hiring is a continuous process, attrition increases both the cost and the time invested in it. While new employees bring a fresh perspective, to the organization, they also require some ramp up time assimilating to the new set-up.

A Forbes report from May 2012, found that only 19% of the American workers were satisfied with their jobs while 44% were dissatisfied. According to Mercer, 32% of the Americans polled wanted to change their jobs.

How to ‘measure’ satisfaction?

Qualitative speculation about the reasons of dissatisfaction can help design surveys from which analytics generates a quantitative comparison. This can help with an in-depth understanding of the various causes of dissatisfaction amongst different employees groups in the organization.

The preferred approach is to:

Identify the key areas that influence the employees work life i.e., Performance Management, Career Development, Communication from the organization, etc.

Structure the survey questionnaire to help gather employee opinion about each.

Analyse the response at an overall theme as well as at individual question level which will help identify the dimensions which the employees are dissatisfied or satisfied about.

For example: Employees may be happy about the career development opportunities but feel that performance management program needs improvement. They may like the day-to-day activities of the organization but would like to hear more about the plans and vision of the top management.

Having identified the specific areas of improvement, organizations can act with the best possible preparedness. The greatest contribution of analytics however is not just in helping streamline the approach to improve satisfaction, but also quantifying the results of the actions. This helps the management improve their programs and restructure their approach for better outcomes.

The aggregated response from the employees can be compared over different time periods to analyse the change in employee satisfaction and engagement. Managers can compare their current score with the previous to identify the areas where they have improved and areas which need further improvement.

Organizations which operate across multiple geographies have an even more difficult task when it comes to identifying factors that both inhibit and increase employee satisfaction due to the wide variation in the cultures. For such organizations it is not just important to identify the overall factors. They also need an added level of specificity to identify the variation of the causes. Only when organizations implement transparent and specific courses of action can they truly increase satisfaction among their employees.

For the last 3 years, BRIDGEi2ihas partnered with a major business outsourcing company to help analyse and manage their employees’ satisfaction. We established the correlation between an employee’s satisfaction and his or her willingness to recommend to other prospective employees. We also identified how engagement is driven by career defining attributes while satisfaction is driven by immediate objectives from an employee’s perspective. This helped the client initiate programs which helped improve both employee satisfaction and engagement. We provided a two-tier report to help the client act at overall pan-organization level as well as at individual business unit levels.

Using our proprietary EmPOWER tool we provided interactive scorecards to over 2,000 managers with the analysis for their teams. The tool provides the ability to analyse satisfaction and engagement for different employee segments and also provides summarized data that managers can use for their own analysis.

Using text analytics we provided the key words and phrases that had been used by the employees during the survey to distinguish between what they like and what improvement they would like to see. The scorecard also provides the ability to compare a manager to his/her peers and to the overall organization simultaneously.

The tool provides a guide to prioritize the drivers based on their impact on employee satisfaction and retention. This helps the managers to create appropriate action plans to take corrective measures.

Several organizations have started using employee surveys to enhance employee satisfaction and engagement. However, few have mastered the art of measuring it in a way that translates into actions. Each organization is unique in the composition and relative intensity of factors that impact the engagement of their employees.

We understand organizations’ need for granular and personalized actionable insights on an ongoing basis – these form the bedrock of BRIDGEi2i‘s employee engagement platform EmPOWER. EmPOWER provides meaningful suggestions through robust statistical methods, delivered through intuitive and interactive online visualization, with quick turnaround.

This blog is written by Devesh Chandgothia, Business Analyst at BRIDGEi2i

About BRIDGEi2i:BRIDGEi2iprovides Business Analytics Solutions to enterprises globally, enabling them to achieve accelerated business impact harnessing the power of data. Our analytics services and technology solutions enable business managers to consume more meaningful information from big data, generate actionable insights from complex business problems and make data driven decisions across pan-enterprise processes to create sustainable business impact. To know more visit www.bridgei2i.com

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position or viewpoint of BRIDGEi2i.

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